“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.

Science groups, led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), sent a letter to Congress reminding lawmakers of the “the consensus scientific view of climate change.”

“This conclusion is based on multiple independent lines of evidence and the vast body of peer-reviewed science,” the AAAS letter reads. “There is strong evidence that ongoing climate change is having broad negative impacts on society, including the global economy, natural resources, and human health.”

But Curry, a noted skeptic of many of the claims of global warming alarmists, argued science groups shouldn’t be using science to press political goals. Indeed, AAAS is headed by Rush Holt, a former Democratic lawmaker.

“National security and economics (specifically called out in the letter) is well outside the wheelhouse of all of these organizations,” Curry wrote. “In fact, climate science is well outside the wheelhouse of most of these organizations (what the heck is with the statisticians and mathematicians in signing this?)”

“The rest are professional societies who are not involved with the physics of climate but explicitly profit from the alarm,” Curry said.

Professional science groups have been increasingly releasing statements on global warming science as the public debate heats up, but what’s odd about the current letter to Congress is the amount of non-climate related groups pushing lawmakers to stop questioning science.

For example, the American Public Health Association, the American Statistical Association and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics signed the letter, which Curry criticized.

One notable climate science group, the American Physical Society, did not sign the letter. APS told The Washington Post why it didn’t sign on:

“The American Physical Society did not sign the [2016] letter because it was presented as a fait accompli, and there are significant differences between the letter and the APS Statement on Earth’s Changing Climate,” the group told The Post. “The APS statement went through a two-year vetting process involving multiple committees, the society’s 53,000-plus membership and the board of directors.”

This is not the first time AAAS has sent a letter to Congress. The group sent a similar letter in 2009, while lawmakers were debating a national cap-and-trade program. AAAS also sent a letter to House lawmakers last year condemning their investigation into a government scientist.

“Well, I am somewhat reassured that this is not the population of scientists speaking, but rather the leadership of the professional societies speaking,” Curry wrote.

“It seems that the primary motivation of this is for the leaders of these professional societies to be called to the big table to engage in the Congressional policy deliberations about climate change,” she wrote. “The AAAS and the affiliated professional societies blew it with that letter. They claim the science is settled; in that case, they are no longer needed at the table.”

“Instead, by their dogmatic statements about climate change and their policy advocacy, they have become just another group of lobbyists, having ceded the privilege traditionally afforded to dispassionate scientific reasoning to political activists in the scientific professional societies,” she added. “With a major side effect of damaging the process and institutions of science, along with the public trust in science.”

“The AAAS et al. have shot themselves in the foot with this one,” she wrote.

“It turned out that letter was drafted by, at least in part, an environmental activist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
Do you have proof it was Kenji?
I can’t believe Kenji would become an environmental activist…so sad.

The AAAS under the leadership of Margaret Mead in 1975, was the primary instigator of the “modern” version of the AGW myth. She convened the “Endangered Atmosphere Conference” that year, the first serious conference of its kind. Mead was an anthropologist and avid population control advocate. ( Population control remains an unspoken and unreported motive of the current AGW movement.). Mead’s statement at the opening of the conference is quite remarkable:

“What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings,warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before
the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats ”

“….artifical but effective warnings..” They have certainly perfected that directive from Mead. 41 years later we now get daily artificial but effective warnings!

Read the 2007 article, “Where The Global Warming Hoax Was Born”, by Marjorie Mazel-Hecht available on the internet.

Thankfully she purged herself by dying in 1978 – one less radical leftist nut case to torture us with climate change blather. However, John Holdren, also a radical population control activist and Mead disciple(he was at the 1975 conference) is BO’s senior science advisor.

The AAAS letter, itself, plays a very odd dance between present going-ons with the weather and future predictions of horror. First, it assumes that most to all climate change (which is not really differentiated from global warming specifically) is man-made; anthropogenic greenhouse gases is presented as the main driver. Are they actually claiming that radical ACC (not naturally occurring, mind you) is happening in the moment and in recent years; such that it “is having broad negative impacts on society?” Where and when, mind you? The last 0.5C +/- of warming is all caused man, and all extreme weather and SLR is currently caused by man. Or, are they trying to tell Congress that they are all simply predicting it for the future; “The severity of climate change impacts is increasing and is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades?”

The letter presents no case for anything of note. This is from scientists? It reads like it was written by a 4th grader.

It’s also interesting that in describing the so-called ‘consensus,’ that it does not lay it out as the “97%;” perhaps a bit of evidence that even they know how bogus that claim is.

Note: We should all hold their feet to the fire, demanding that the warmists, inc politicians and the media, understand that there is global temperature change as well as other forms of climate change that are naturally occurring and these [decadal] cycles are quite extreme by themselves, and then there is predicted additional global warming believed to be caused by man, and that this additional GW, AGW, is predicted (by warmists) to result in additional forms of CC, including more extreme weather events in the future, hence ACC or CACC.

When speaking of naturally occurring GW or CC – then it should be described simply as that..

When speaking of some perceived additional warming (or less cooling) they should always be specific and say AGW, and when speaking of CC caused by the AGW, then they should label it as ACC, or CACC, etc.

The warmists should never simply say “climate change,” when inferring that it’s something caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The answer to the question, “do you believe in climate change?” should be answered with, “of course I do; but I’m curious, did intend to ask me if I believe in anthropogenic climate change. You should be more specific – they are not the same thing.”

I didn’t think non-profit organizations (.org) in the US were allowed to participate in politics as a part of their non-profit charter. Perhaps regulators should take legal action to revoke the non-profit status of these organizations.

I didn’t think non-profit organizations (.org) in the US were allowed to participate in politics as a part of their non-profit charter. Perhaps regulators should take legal action to revoke the non-profit status of these organizations.

They can’t advocate for a specific candidate. They can talk about policies all they like, and they very certainly can say things like in this letter.

“The rest are professional societies who are not involved with the physics of climate but explicitly profit from the alarm,” Curry said.
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We all know there’s plenty of public money available for research into supposed man-made global warming (and relatively little for other likely factors). These $cience bodies naturally don’t want the taps turned off, so try to shut down alternative ideas any way they can, including legal action.

But APS stuffed Kooning’s review of the climate science, causing him to resign from the review committee and go public with his findings in the WSJ. Good for APS not joining in this AAAS abomination, but not very good of APS overall.

I think this reflects the fact that activists have taken over the administrative positions in an amazing number of scientific societies. (It’s important to keep things in perspective, however, in order to really understand what’s going on. Currently there is a strange amalgam between bona fide research and dubious faux science, which has greatly infected some fields while leaving others quite unscathed. In fact, it might be worthwhile to consider the whole business from an epidemiological perspective.)

Except that the promoters of AGW theory can’t supply any real objective data that supports their hypothesis, nor will they debate and defend their assumptions and data with scientists who disagree with their conclusions. The fact that other scientists outside of climate science accept their conclusion is meaningless. It reverts back to the good old “consensus” argument. Many scientists, including mathematicians and physicists, challenge the very basic physics and mathematical assumptions of the theory and the computer models. The validity of a scientific hypothesis neither comes from consensus (a logical fallacy, by the way) nor computer projections – it comes from data. If you are following the current research, you will find that many scientists find that the probability of the planet entering a prolonged period of cooling is increasing. That comes from real data, specifically from the sun, that AGW theorists choose to ignore.

“It’s getting increasingly hard for Curry to accuse scientists of just riding the gravy train, when even scientists outside of climate science accept the reality of manmade climate change.”

Just who by name accepts such? Just what part do you not understand; of that article about Margret Mead and John Holdren, both presidents of the very same “American Association for the Advancement of Science” (AAAS), where they clearly admit they must make false claims of science in order to be effective!

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. – D. Eisenhower